Driving the Vegas Strip.
Facades. Costumes. False advertising.
Traffic.
We inch past a man in an Elvis costume. He stands on a street corner beside a little bucket, collecting tips.
“Wow,” says Eli. “That’s his work.”
We crawl alongside a narrow panel truck with ads on three sides, “Hot girls want to meet YOU.” The driver relaxes in the cab, used to local traffic. He enjoys the sunny day, windows down, radio blaring.
“Wow,” says Eli. “That’s his work.”
We pass the Sphinx. The Eiffel Tower. The Great Pyramid of Giza. The Statue of Liberty. The Brooklyn Bridge.
Time and space collapse in one desultory panorama. Here, everyone scrambles to make a living. Karl Marx was right. Across time and space, one universal feature of human nature stands out: work.
We watch an artist work in an outdoor booth. With manic motion, he sprays coated paper with paint until all the colours bleed together into brown. With a spatula, he etches a perfect representation of the Strip. Colour comes forth under colour, shape appears within shape.
“Wow,” says Eli. “That’s pretty cool.”
We put a tip in his bucket.
We enter a Cirque du Soleil show: The Beatles: LOVE.
During the second song, dancers destroy the set. Eleanor Rigby, Father MacKenzie, and all the lonely people are war widows, orphans, and refugees.
Nothing in the show is as I expect. Sad songs name new freedoms; carefree songs weep with despair. No aspect of love goes unexamined: unity, discord, friendship, money, grief and healing.
Eli is speechless.
Maybe Plato is more right than Marx. Reach across all time and space, and you will find what drives every human being: Love.
We drive thirty miles outside Las Vegas to Hoover Dam.
Artist Oskar J.W. Hansen loved the grandeur of the dam and designed its Memorial Plaza as a galactic map. If he could fix the dam’s precise location in cosmic time, he thought, even aliens from another planet might appreciate the achievement. Under our feet, blue and white tiles represent constellations, stars, and planetary lines. Time and space collapse into a two-dimensional representation.
Under the real moon, clock towers show local time. On top of the dam, Pacific time ends and Mountain time begins. You cross the invisible state line, and an hour disappears. Suddenly you have run out of time.
Aunt Sylvia is 100 years old, a very grand age. But somehow, on Sunday, her body crossed an invisible state line. No more will it repair itself. Suddenly she has run out of time.
So has my vacation; love will drive me to Phoenix where I can fly out to New York to see her.
My vacation has bled into brown and grey. Upon it, I etch a perfect metaphorical representation of my inner life. Colour under colour comes through; shape within shape is revealed. Nothing is as I expect; everything gives forth a new interpretation.
Work and love, time and space, life and death. No place is empty of your mysteries, and no metaphor can fully capture you.
— Images: Las Vegas Strip, Hoover Dam by LDK
Thanks Laura for this. Motti and I were entertained. Is it just you and Eli travelling?
From the warmth of Tel Aviv and later today in Netanya we send you our best for a safe and fun journey.
smiles and hugs,
Shabbat Shalom,
Karen
Sorry to hear that Aunt Sylvia slipped into a non-Sedona vortex. Expected Time has given way to an unexpected Space. There may be a holiday from work, but there’s no holiday from life. And, when one gets away from the false facades of the Vegas-like world that we surround ourselves with, there’s no holiday from the unexpected. But may Eli, whose eyes and mouth are opening, grow to have eyes like yours and words like yours. Adonai, sefatai tiftach.
I was in Vegas last year for a conference and spent my evenings walking the Strip. It’s so wow and weird for about five minutes, and then it just seems so stupid and shallow. I won fifty dollars on my first pull on a slot machine, then lost fifteen of it before cashing out from sheer boredom. On one walk, I turned perpendicular to the Strip and kept going until I found myself passing through a shopping area and neighborhood. When I got as far away from the Strip as I cared to have to walk back, I looked up at the tall hotels and bright lights. Sin City is so attractive from a distance!